Tag | Twitter Posts

I’m not sure if it is ego or a desire to inform our community, but many of us try to post to blogs on a regular basis. Many companies choose to have their own blog server to host content from their employees. But this doesn’t always work, especially when your employees already have a community presence before joining the team. Recently our company has been trying to conquer this very issue. The first question is “what are your goals”. For us it is to aggregate blog postings/articles that could be ...

Yesterday Twitter released their Windows 8 native application. This is just a short time after releasing an update for Windows Phone. It took my all of two minutes determine that these applications are unusable for the way I use Twitter and their web site doesn’t cut it either. Now I admit that my usage may not be the same as the majority of Twitter subscribers, but I don’t think it is entirely outside the norm either. I use multiple accounts because of user groups that I work with and employer accounts. ...

While I post on a regular basis, Twitter has become my pointer to any blogs that I read. I haven’t logged into a RSS app or Google Reader in a long time. When Feed Reader was featured on a web site recently (sorry but I can’t remember which one) I decided to give it a try. It logged directly to my old Google Reader account which made getting started a breeze. That app easily shares links via Twitter or saves them to Instapaper. The wildest feature is that it will audibly read each post. I can’t say ...

Windows Phone 7 has been out for about two years now. In that time I have switched back and forth with different free Twitter apps. Mostly the has been because someone has mentioned one or another that they like. I figured I would give a quick run down of what I felt were the pros and cons of each. These are only the ones that I have used and your mileage may vary. So here we go. WP7 Built-In Twitter Functionality While it is great that Microsoft put this functionality in, it is extremely limited ...

For those out there that are interested… I am now one of the hosts of the Driven2Distraction podcast. Being a fan of podcasts like .Net Rocks and Hanselminutes for years now, I have always wanted to be involved in the recording of a podcast and now that time has finally come. What makes the Driven2Distraction podcast different from all the others out there is its uniquely South African flair. It’s focus is towards Software Development in the Southern Africa – and has a mix of “what happening locally” ...

I’ve had my 15” Mac Book Pro for a little over a year now, and its hands-down the best laptop I’ve ever owned…hardware wise. And I tried, I really really tried, to like OSX. I even bought Parallels so I could run Windows 7 and all my development tools while still trying to live in an OSX world. But in the end, I missed Windows too much. There were just too many shortcomings with OSX that kept me from being productive. For one thing, Office for Mac is *not* Office for Windows. The applications are ...

Everyone loves naming conventions and product code names :) I’ve see a few people mislead by blogs and so called “.com press” to the point of confusion about what Windows Phone 7.5 Refresh and Windows Phone SDK 7.1.1 actually are in reality. So let’s clarify: Windows Phone 7.5 Refresh – is the name of the refresh update to Windows Phone OS that allows for broad reach to new markets and languages, previously not supported in Windows Phone 7.5 OS. This update also provides support for market specific ...

For those interested, myself and a few other people from Red Gate will be going to DevWeek 2012 in London this week. I'll be mostly around the .NET and C# talks, but may drop into the architecture and agile talks as well. I'll be blogging interesting stuff I come across as well. If you want to meet up, do feel free to contact me via the blog or on twitter at @simonmcooper. See you there!Cross posted from Simple Talk ...

The most recent release of LINQ to Twitter included support for Windows Phone. It’s important to note that only 7.1 is supported – the rationale being that 7.1 (Mango) introduced support for IQueryable, which LINQ to Twitter requires. This post will show you how to use LINQ to Twitter with Windows Phone. You’ll see a normal public query, how to log in with OAuth, and how to post a tweet. All of the code in this blog post is included with the LINQ to Twitter source code that you can download at http://linqtotwitter.codepl... ...

Today we launched a new feature on Geekswithblogs.net to make it easier to share your posts with short URLs. The domain we are using is wblo.gs and you can share individual post or you can share you main blog page through the shortened URLs. To share your blog URL, use your blog application name like this: http://wblo.gs/jjulian – Jeff’s Blog http://wblo.gs/ – Geekswithblogs.net Community Page If you would like to share a post using a short URL, you can find the URL in two places. The first is on ...

Well, hello there. I have returned after 5 months of radio silence. Those of you that follow me on Twitter or G+ know that my wife and I welcomed a new child in mid-December, which explains most of my disappearance. I wanted to return with some global blog news, speaking updates, etc. Thus, without further ado... Let us begin with Card Roulette. No, I have not forgotten about it. I haven't posted about it in awhile, but I have been playing with the requirements. If you have been following the actual ...

If you don’t know TweetDeck , it’s a very popular app to check Twitter. It is created with Adobe Air for the Desktop versions(Windows,Mac) and native for mobile. TweetDeck was integrated to twitter.Inc in Mai 2011. Its success is due to the columns of tweets. What we are going to see in this tutorial : Creation of TweetDeck like UI with columns Skinning components Getting tweets using Twitter service (without authentication) Using States Showing the time of the tweet when scrolling Horizontal Scroll ...

In my previous post, Using LINQ to Twitter in Windows 8 Metro Apps, I cheated a little (some might say a lot) on my UI architecture by using code-behind. In this post, I’ll make it all better by showing you how to separate the model and interaction logic from the UI design – proper separation of concerns. I’ll accomplish this with a pattern, named Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM), which is widely used for WPF, Silverlight, and (soon) Windows 8 Metro Apps. I’ll start by discussing what MVVM is, move to ...

While the title of this post suggests focus on LINQ to Twitter, it also indicates that I’ll be discussing how to build a Windows 8 Metro application. The application itself will display a list of tweets from Twitter’s public feed. In the sections that follow, you’ll read background information on pre-requisites to understanding the post, learn how to get LINQ to Twitter working with Visual Studio 11, and then see a step-by-step on how the application is built. Getting Started You can build Metro ...

Its been a few weeks since I talked about my Windows Phone project. I bunch of things have happened during this time. I finished my primary requirements and began paper mock-ups of the screens. I say paper, but its really PowerPoint. I have done this technique for Android applications and found it very helpful. I also want to take this time to thank Michael Crump for assisting me with these mock-ups. He has given me some valued advice and my next revision of this mock-up will have additional screens. ...

We often hear people say things like “Live with no regrets”, but I don’t think that’s literally what people mean. I know I’ve regretted many things in my past and there are some things I look back on with great disdain. One of those things is my high school football career. I played 1.5 seasons with my high school team. The problem – I didn’t take it seriously enough. I wanted to have fun, not focus so much on winning and losing…not focus so much on conditioning and honing my skills…not focus on ...

An interesting discussion popped up on Twitter between myself, Steve Rogalsky, Terry Bunio, Mike Iwasiow, David Alpert, and some others around using hours as a software estimating unit of measure. Steve’s been reading the book Beyond the Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and blogged about his stance on using hours for sizing work items. In a nutshell Goldratt offers the following arguments: Asking someone for a timeframe to complete a task puts their image in jeopardy PMs will always try to squeeze whatever ...

I've been working on a little project recently and one of the requirements was to be able to identify someone's influence in the social media space. I happened to come across Klout which if you are not familiar is a service where people can connect all of their social networking accounts together and it will then analyze your public activity and workout how much Klout you have. Even if you have not joined Klout it still looks at public Twitter information and can rate users just based on their public ...

In a previous post I talked about using the JSON to LINQ features of JSON.NET. Thanks to Bil Simser I was able to do some testing of the deserialization capabilities of this library. The key was his hint to leverage the json2csharp web site. Below is the C# representation of the search results for a Twitter query created by putting an example of the search result into this site. public class Url{ public string url { get; set; } public string expanded_url { get; set; } public string display_url { ...

While adding a new feature to the LINQ to Twitter Search API, I made significant changes to the Search entity that will break existing code. The new feature is support for Tweet Entities, a recent addition to Twitter’s Search API. I’ll cover Tweet Entities support after explaining what has changed. Motivation for Change When Twitter implemented Tweet Entities for their Search API, they only supported JSON format. LINQ to Twitter used ATOM for Search API queries; so, I didn’t have a choice on data ...

I received the good news on Jan 1st that, for the 4th year in a row, I was awarded a Microsoft MVP award for ASP.NET/IIS. There’s some movement as there always is – some people not getting renewed their MVP award, new people attaining it. Some people have publically voiced how they turned down the award or just didn’t bother working for it for a variety of reasons that I won’t get into here. There’s also been some passionate Twitter discussions around community and groups and how valid they are, ...

Over the past few weeks we have been cleaning up the skins to support most modern browsers and monitor resolutions. This will cause your content area to have more space and support larger images. If you see any problems, please email us at support@geekswithblogs.com and we will get back to you ASAP. We have also added some changes to the “Share Link” feature to make it a little cleaner and support for Facebook, Twitter, and Technorati. We will add G+ once they support the ability to publish from ...

One month in... Well, it's been a month on the new site now. I guess at first I thought everyone would just start following the new feed and the traffic would magically appear at WDN, but I still saw a lot of folks hitting GWB, presumably looking for good Silverlight links. So I announced my postings at GWB to not leave anyone out of the loop. And now I find that's annoyed some people... sorry about that! I can't see cross-posting the posts completely, so you'll just have to go to the new site to ...

For those of you who have the Samsung Slate 7 that Microsoft gave at Build (or that you purchase yourself!), and who are travelling: I hate to take chargers for all my gadgets, especially since my Windows Phone, my Bluetooth stereo headset and my Kindle (amongst others) all use micro-USB to charge. So I just take a couple of micro USB cables and I can charge my devices from the PC. Read the rest of this entry » ...

In November Alex Groß (http://therightstuff.de/) was in Uganda for holidays and we hijacked him to speak to us on some .NET geek stuff. In the image above you see Allan Rwakatungu, Jude Opima, Myself and Alex Groß. More pictures http://www.flickr.com/photo... These are some of the topics that were discussed. Test Driven Development. Alex shared a great amount detail and a step by step tour of how you can work with unit tests and went on to show MSpec as a BDD tool. ...

Ive been doing a little stuff with the Twitterize library and the twitter API.I started unexpectedly getting a 401 unauthorized error when things had been working fine previously.Eventually I tracked this down to be an issue with clock sync. I am using VM Ware fusion on Mac and when if suspended then resumed my VM the clock wasnt always in sync. When this was fixed it all works fine.Note to self the way to change the VM ishttp://kb.vmware.com/self... ...

It's always exciting when a new application you've worked on goes live. The last couple of weeks have seen the 'soft' launch of a new service offered by the UK government called 'Tell Us Once' (TUO). You can probably guess from the name what the service does. Currently, the service allows UK citizens to inform the government (as opposed to Register Officers, who must still be notified separately) just once of two types of 'change-of-circumstance' event; namely births and deaths. You can go, say, ...

The main way that Twitter provides feeds is through JSON. Unfortunately the version of the .NET Framework that is on the phone does not include the System.Runtime.Serializatio... namespace. Rather than trying to brute force the JSON feed I have been looking into using the Newtonsoft JSON.NET library. The first thing that I ran into with JSON.NET is that the documentation is severely tilted to the serialization side with almost no mention of deserialization. This would have been my preferred approach ...

Here we go! After the Microsoft team released version 5 of Silverlight yesterday, MVVM Light is available for this version of the framework too. I did not create the installer yet (that will take a few more days), but you can download the source code and build it yourself easily.

Microsoft just released the version 5 of Silverlight! It’s a great news and I really want to congratulate the whole team on this impressive collective effort. The official announcement is on the Silverlight team blog! Read the rest of this entry » ...

I was recently made aware of a couple of people having issues with WCF services (or ASP.NET applications) when using the MVVM Light project template for Silverlight. There is a blog post and a StackOverflow question, so what exactly is happening there?

I have just recived this from the Author of that excellent product NMAP:"Um, what people WANT when they download Nmap is Nmap itself. Not tohave their searches redirected to Bing and their home page changed toMicrosoft's MSN.Speaking of which, Microsoft emailed me today. They said that theydidn't know they were sponsoring CNET to trojan open source software,and that they have stopped doing it. But the trojan installer usesyour Internet connection to obtain more "special offers" from CNET,and they ...

I'm into my 3rd day using my new web app at WindowsDevNews.It seems like it might be a good time to answer some questions I've gotten and expose a little of the LightSwitch app that Michael Washington put together.Check it out at New Web App Day 3.And while you're at it, subscribe to the feed and follow the new postings at @windowsdevnews. Thanks ...

In my search for a way to allow readers to tweet post that I put on GWB I have come across the TweetMeme plug-in for Windows Live Writer. It automatically puts a twitter button at either the top or bottom of your post depending on how you configure it. It comes with a warning that it does not work with blog servers that strip out script from posts which I made me afraid it was going to make it incompatible with GWB. This turned out to be the case so I figured we would need either an upgrade to the ...

I have wanted to have a Tweet button on my individual posts for a short while. So here is a test to see if the Twitter code for their button con work on Geeks With Blogs site via Windows Live Writer. Tweet del.icio.us Tags: Twitter,Tweet blog ...

A little bit of everything... The heading above got changed a bunch during writing and I finally settled on that because this has become a 'stream of consciousness' post... or maybe a stream of UNconsciousness :) If you've noticed, my blogging has been a tad slow this fall. There's been a lot going on personally. But then again, I haven't skipped anybody either. Rather than go through ALL the blogs I have aggregated, and take a week to get to the bottom, at some point in the last year, I had moved ...

My Lenovo ThinkPad's built-in screen maxes at 1366x768x32. I wanted to use that same resolution with Windows 8 Developer Preview inside of VirtualBox. So, what did I do? Downloaded the latest build of VirtualBox v4.1.6 (because it supports Windows 8 x64) Installed Windows 8 Developer Preview in VirtualBox as I did earlier this year. Installed Guest Additions. Ran the CustomVideoMode described in this blog post. …and quickly found out that I didn’t have the option to use 1366x768x32 inside of VirtualBox ...

After reviewing some of the feedback from our bloggers we added a couple new features to Geekswithblogs.net and there are still more to come. Here is a list of the features we added. Fixed the Twitter parser to better support URLs and Hash Tags Added some hooks behind the scenes to tags posts with common keywords automatically Added Facebook likes and Tweets to the bottom of every post Cleaned up a few skins Images on the main page for bloggers who use Gravatar or Twitter integration Random bug fixes ...

On Tuesday November 22th, VISUG User Group has hosted an event at Microsoft Belgium about Hosted TFS by Hassan Fadili see http://www.visug.be/Eventde... This event was very interactive and many as 60 people have taken part. The topic was about Build, Relase and Deploy with TFS2011 and MS Deploy. A combination of Slides and Demo's was perfect to explain this common mechanism for developers.To learn more about this topic check the earlier article pubished by Hassan ...